MV says that the rejection of life appears in later states, but that at the time of birth, and already before, everything is acceptance of life. But, is this so?? What can be said of the outcry with which children are born, of the primordial cry, of the first traumatic contact (studied by Freud) with the world? Is the child’s outcry not already his first philosophical opinion about the world? Why is he not born laughing, or at least calm? When the baby is dumped into the world at the time of childbirth, his first reaction is pessimistic, a protest against disregard and disturbance, an initial outcry that he did not have to learn, as he will have to learn to laugh in the first few weeks or even months of life (which already marks, in the very inaugural act of being, the pessimistic asymmetry: the baby learns to laugh, but is born crying); the baby is born, forced by the desires of others, in an initial desperation, in a cry of deep and abysmal helplessness, in a primordial terror that, immediately, through movements, caresses, comforts, etc., adults will try to soften; movements that will be repeated throughout his life: initial despair followed by protective comforts; but the comforts are posterior to the despair; the despair comes first, and the comforts are the reactions. They are not on the same level. Asymmetry!
Argentine philosopher
The moral tradition says: we have many natural tendencies, but as ethical human beings we have to try to overcome natural impulses. For example, we are naturally violent; human beings are naturally very selfish, trying to focus their decisions on themselves, but ethics is always saying: you have to fight against these natural tendencies. You cannot be all the violent that nature commands, you cannot be everything selfish that nature asks for. So if you tell me that procreation is natural, being natural does not show it to be moral. On the contrary, forgotten Brazilian philosophers like Tobias Barreto put exactly the opposite. Tobias Barreto thought that when something is natural it is bad, and we have to fight it. (The enslavement of one people over others is natural, but it is cultural that slavery must not exist.) So do not tell me that procreation is natural and so we have to do it. All human morality is unnatural; all human morality is artificial, just as our feeding systems in our sophisticated restaurants are also artificial and unnatural. What is the animal that eats the way we eat? Even our sexuality is artificial; it is not purely instinctual, but largely symbolic. If you had that argument in your sleeve, you would still have to show that what comes from nature is moral, because there are many arguments showing that what comes from nature can be opposite of morality.
People talk about the "wonderful experience of parenthood". Have you ever wondered why it is so wonderful? It may be wonderful because it is very manipulative; manipulating gives a lot of pleasure, because you have a person in your hands. When the child is small you wear it as you want, comb as you want, cut the hair, put on the table, as I have frequently seen it. The adults play with the child, people who would have no subject of conversation or interaction, when their empty, insignificant gray lives would come to light, the child saves them.
The best would have been not to be born. Not being born is, in a negative ethics, the absolute good; but it is, precisely, the good that cannot be sought. (Attention: the situation is more radical than in the case of goods that can be sought but never achieved; not being born cannot even be sought).
What is meant by "ethics" in this initial context of reflection cannot be anything too complicated or strongly committed to particular ethical theories, but rather quite a basic concept that could be accepted by them all. I propose to speak of a "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" (FEA from now on) to refer to the following concept: In decisions and actions, we must take also into account the moral and sensitive interests of others and not only our own, trying not to give systematic primacy to the latter just because they are our interests.
In a first moment, philosophizing is, for me, the fundamental way of man's installation in the world: a way that is insecure, fearful, ignorant, unsatisfied, desirous, incomplete, and suffering. I link philosophizing with despair. Philosophizing is the very cry of finitude, whatever the scope or level where it manifests itself. These primary feelings are present in all people, so that at this first moment, and as was always said before the professionalization of philosophy, we are all philosophers for the simple and terrible fact that we are in the peculiar human way of being: finite, mortal, threatened, helpless, ignorant, and questioning beings, thrown into an unwelcoming world. In the midst of the tumult of their daily concerns and personal dramas, from time to time the essential questions arise in all people, literate or illiterate, inevitably: meaning, death, pain. These questions are immediately buried by the majority, or put aside; for long periods, one lives as if they didn't exist. In a second thought, on the contrary, almost nobody is a philosopher, not even most philosophy professors. For philosophers are those questioning and wanting beings who turn their threatened finitude into an obsessive quest for knowledge and a powerful form of sensibility (and sexuality!) that manifests total priority over any other concern; not because the philosopher sets out to do so, but because he is compulsively cast into this peculiar form of existence. It is as if the philosopher, in this second sense, exacerbates or brings to a paroxysm that which is a fleeting and dispensable moment for most people. The philosopher is the one for whom those anxious and uncomfortable questions are his permanent atmosphere, the air he breathes, the center of gravitation of his way of being. The obsession with knowledge, the susceptibility to all that is finite, incomplete and insecure, to the constant threat of the world, to despair without consolation, bring new misfortunes to the philosopher, not something like a "wisdom of life." On the contrary, humans who simply live the drama of being human without reflecting it, possess strengths, defenses, and wisdoms that the philosopher loses in the very instant he sets out to reflect. In this sense, the genuine philosopher has no wisdom to offer; on the contrary, he will spend his life trying to recover, through thought, the wisdom he believed he had when he was not a philosopher (Wittgenstein: a tragicomic example of this).